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Should I convert from Yahoo Sitebuilder to Wordpress and where do you begin?

My site, www.TheHeismanWinners.com is six years old and has grown to more than 400 pages long. I've been told that to be current, I need to convert to Wordpress. The thought is I would have more interaction with fans through social plugins and would benefit from all of the SEO friendly components.

However, won't the site take an SEO smack with changed URLs? How does one go about converting that many pages to a different format. How would you flip the switch from one platform to another?

13 Responses

The only difference is that the URL's on your current site end in ".html". Although that is not the natural way to have URL's in WordPress you can achieve that by following this http://www.postfever.com/add-html-extension-to-wordpress-url/

As far as moving the information over. I've never used Sitebuilder but from what I can tell it is just an html file site that Yahoo hosts. This means you will want to set up a development site either on your computer or on a host and begin moving the content over making sure to save the page with the same "slug" as what was on the original site. With the amount of pages you have now, this will take quite a bit of time but it would be totally worth it in the long run.

When you are ready to launch the site you would change the DNS information and adjust the core files in your WP install. There is a huge community around WP and you can find plenty of developers to do this for you or you can learn to do it yourself with all the tutorial blogs on the web.

I or any other excellent web firms here on SEOmoz can do this for not much money at all.

There are many ways of doing this. I will tell you I have converted 5 sites personally to WordPress. There tons of benefits to doing this if you would like to see an example of what I mean take a look at http://www.ras-tech.com this is the staging server of what will be the new version of RAS-Tech built on WordPress http://rastech.wpengine.com one of choices you have is to build a like for like as I just showed you or pick a theme and update your websites look and feel along with updating the type of website you are now using. I have a developer we use Genesis framework as it seems to be the easiest to use. There's many different types of framework for WordPress and this is my personal opinion. If you would like to get your site converted as an exact replica as you've seen in the links I've shown above or you would like to maybe have it based on a theme go to pick a theme

SEO – WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are a few tweaks you need to make, but there are many seo benefits that WordPress provides for free. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.

Content – it is easy to update content on your website without knowing HTML. Do you hate the idea of having to learn to use a complex HTML editor tool like Dreamweaver? Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Well no longer – once WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.

Extensions – There is a thriving ecosystem of developers creating themes and plug-ins – imagine free design themes, or the ability to extend your website with polls, contact forms, ratings or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.

Support – If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!

One-click-installation – Quick installs are provided by many hosting providers,

as for hosting providers I personally feel you should go with a managed WordPress host. I have used almost all of them and feel you really can't go wrong with any of them.

This is a good list the order is not as it should be but use one of the WordPress

To reiterate - you will not do any harm upgrading and changing URLs. I would recommend NOT using that plugin to keep the .html extension. Have someone setup your redirects from the old pages to the new pages in the .htaccess file. Use the Yoast SEO plugin and you can edit the .htaccess file right within wordpress.

I agree with Dan the Yost SEO plug-in is something you definitely want. I think if you go to http://wordpress.org and simply look around at the amount of plug-ins you will realize that anything you want to have done with your website can be done using WordPress. You will have so many new ways of adding information quickly and fixing issues simply by downloading a plug-in that would normally have you calling a developer I don't feel that there's anyway you could go wrong by using WordPress opposed to HTML

If you would like to ask anymore questions or chat about this I have done quite a bit of this work lately. Please feel free to private message me or e-mail me at your discretion. I would be happy to share what I have learned about this at no cost. I'm actually going to posting a blog on this topic in the very near future.

Thanks again for your feedback to my August 2012 question regarding switching from Yahoo Sitebuilder to Wordpress. Certainly interested in exploring a strategy to revitalize TheHeismanWinners.com.

Since posting my question in August, I have thinned out the site by eliminating many of the numerous affiliate links. Thought Google would reward my switch to more content and less product pages, but I think that Big ole' Panda is still squeezing me.

Feel like I'm getting close to wanting to make that switch. I've deleted quite a few affiliate product pages in hopes of pushing Panda away and so that there won't be as many pages to switch over. There are many more that I can delete as well.

What type of services can you provide to help with a smooth transition to Wordpress?

Ed, I highly agree with Robert that switching from Yahooo site builder to wordpress is a good idea but remember when comes to URL migration and other changes you should have to have a plan before you move on implementation because sometimes small changes can make big differences and you get serious SEO smack which sometimes is not that easy to recover.

I do agree with you when it comes to doing this you should to it the right way. Meaning not only planning for the move. Using the correct DNS settings to correctly change your site so it is a fluid perfect handoff. One thing I cannot stress more is use a host that is ranked well and a managed WordPress host for instance I use WP engine, Zippy kid, Page.ly & web synthesis every one of those guys will be able to go above and beyond in moving your current website to their platform. I would strongly suggest speaking to one of the people at the above hosts telling them what you plan on doing and then implementing the plan With their help. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with the support for managed WordPress hosting companies. If you have any questions about this please feel free to PM me

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